Please participate: global survey on the state and impact of Fortran

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Hi

TL;DR: we are conducting an online survey to better understand the global state and impact of Fortran and the Fortran community. We intend to make the results of the survey available to the entire community. The survey is available here. We’d be delighted if you would complete the survey. It should take about 20 minutes to complete. The survey will close end of day on 12 February 2026 (UK time).

Please circulate this invitation to others who you think would be relevant, outside of fortran-lang.

The detail

  • As far as we are aware, no comparable survey has been conducted on/with the Fortran community. We hope the results of the survey will help the global Fortran community to better understand itself, and also help those outside the community - e.g., other parts of the software industry, funders, policy-makers etc. - to also better understand the global Fortran community.
  • We’d like as large a response as possible to increase the credibility of the results.
  • We’re looking for healthy, professional adults who work with Fortran codebases to complete the survey.
  • We intend to make the results publicly available. Once ‘sanitised’, we intend to make the data available too.
  • We thank several people from the Fortran community for piloting a version of this survey. Their input helped us to better focus the survey.
  • We appreciate that there may be some questions in the survey that Fortran purists might disagree with. We are trying to get the pragmatic balance right.
  • The survey itself is available here.
  • Further information on the survey is available here, including Participant Information Sheet and a reference copy of the Informed Consent (which is part of the online form as well).
  • If you would like to discuss the survey, please contact the Chief Investigator: Prof. Austen Rainer (a.rainer@qub.ac.uk)

Thanks

Austen, on behalf of wider the investigative team, comprising Dr Andrew Brown (Queen’s University Belfast), and Dr Rebecca Taylor and Prof Simon Hettrick (both at University of Southampton).

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Turns out there was a gremlin in the link to further information (there’s a one word explanation: “Microsoft” :wink: ). I am hoping that the following link will work:

https://qubstudentcloud-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/3054450_ads_qub_ac_uk/IgBpHbTvXcwlR6S38DP3rrUlAfK6VMiqy7EoOH0WYCrwkRs

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I’ve included a PDF printout of the survey form in the folder linked to above, so that people can review the questions before deciding whether to participate in the survey. The PDF will make the survey look (a lot) longer than it actually is because of the way the PDF renders drop-down answers. I’ve amended the opening preamble of the online form to refer to the PDF too.

I’ve also simplified the title of the survey (“…Fortran 2025” might be misconstrued as Fortran revision 2025!), and included directly into the form the link to the participant information sheet and other documentation, for more direct access.

Thanks to @rouson for these suggestions.

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A further two clarifications (and thanks to @certik for bringing these to my attention): when I wrote, “We’re looking for healthy, professional adults”, this was influenced by the requirements of the ethics committee who approved the study, e.g., any involvement with, say, vulnerable adults raises additional issues with ethics. I therefore felt obliged to make that clear.

Then, when I wrote “professional”, we don’t mean to restrict this survey to only those who are paid (employed). We want this to be encompassing to include, for example, open source developers and volunteers.

Apologies, and thank you again to those who are bringing these items to my attention. And please do complete the survey. We want this to be a valuable survey for the global Fortran community.

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This afternoon, @abrown41 and I briefly reviewed the responses received so far to the Fortran survey. Independent of the number of people responding (which is itself encouraging) we were particularly impressed with both the quantity and the high quality of the qualitative responses that participants have been making in the survey. Writing such responses takes time and attention. Respondents don’t have to write these things: they are choosing too. For Andrew and me, that’s an indication of the care that people are giving to this survey and, by implication, the care they have for the community.

Thank you.

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A recent addition to the Fortran Wiki

Interoperability in Fortran Wiki

suggests an interesting question – how many Fortran projects are stand-alone, how many have a main program written in Fortran but incorporate other languages, and how many are libraries called from other languages. Personally I would find the answer informative. I do not see that particular line of inquiry in the survey though.

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Thanks for your comment, @urbanjost , and the page you link to, which is interesting. When designing the survey, we were conscious of the time it would take for people to complete the survey, and therefore needed to balance comprehensiveness in data collection with time and, by implication, with completion rates.

When it comes to interpreting the responses from the survey, information like the page you have shared, as well as comments we have directly received from others and those included in the survey responses themselves, will help us to make what I hope will be more valid interpretations, including recognising there are issues we have not asked about.

There is one question in the survey (Q12) which asks, “What other languages are used in, or with, the codebase?“. That question seems to be going in the direction you are referring, since the presence of multiple languages implies some kind of interoperability in the system. But of course, we have not asked questions about how many other languages, or the proportion of Fortran code to non-Fortran code, or the relationship between the code written in different languages, so can’t directly pursue the line of enquiry you raise with the survey.

We must, of course, wait for the complete data from the survey: accepting that, the responses we have received so far suggest there are some Fortran codebases that are entirely (100%) Fortran, whilst others have some mix of other languages. Some respondents are providing identifying information about their codebases, e.g., a URL to the codebase. This would allow a complementary piece of research to look at interoperability.

Thanks again for your comment.

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Since that question will let you identify what is 100% Fortran it will shed more light on what I was asking, as you pointed out nicely. I missed that. Looking forward to seeing the results of your survey.

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We’re stuck on 98 responses. It’d be great to get to 100. Just saying… :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Yay - 100 :partying_face: Thank you.

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Final call :waving_hand: . The survey closes on 12 Feb. If you’d like to complete the survey and have not done so yet, there’s still a couple of days remaining. We have 123 responses so far, which I am personally very pleased about.

Thank you to those who have completed the survey already.

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First of all, a big thank you to everyone who completed the survey on the state and impact of Fortran. Thank you also, again, to the those of you who piloted an earlier version of the survey. That piloting helped significantly with the design, and therefore the effectiveness, of the survey.

Second, I appreciate that people will also want to see the results. My colleagues and I have started to analyse the data. As a token of our thanks I’ll share a summary below of some emerging findings. As we progress with the analysis, and prepare publications, I will share further information. We are committed to open sourcing the dataset, though this may take some time, e.g., we want/need to publish some of this first.

Third, and related to publications, I know there is interest amongst those in the Fortran community to publish a response to the LANL Report on Fortran, with at least one survey respondent expressing interest in co-authorship (I will contact them). If others are interested in being involved, in some way, in preparing a response, please let me know (message me on discourse, or email me at a.rainer@qub.ac.uk). To reassure you, I’ll treat an approach from you as an expression of interest at this stage, with no expectation of commitment.

Fourth, to try to ensure I get this thank you message out to as many people as possible, I’ll be sending an email, sometime in the next few days, so you may get this message again, via another channel.

Finally, I provide a ‘peek’ at the responses below. I enumerate them for ease of cross-reference, rather than for priority. Much of the following is descriptive, but that’s still valuable because I am unaware of any prior attempt to characterise the global Fortran community and, as we found out in the UK, the community is mostly invisible, even to itself. Thus, the following descriptive information helps the community to better understand and appreciate itself.

Here goes:

  1. We had 150 responses. All responses were high quality, an indication that everyone who responded did so conscientiously. That really helps with the rigour of the results.
  2. 27 countries are represented in the responses (26 if one excludes the respondent that identified their codebase as located on “The Moon”). The majority of responses came from the UK (33%), mainland Europe (36%, of which Germany was 13% and France was 8%) and the USA (20%). The high response rate for the UK may be because, in recent years, we have worked to bring together the UK Fortran community.
  3. Most respondents are from universities or similar (37%), the open source community (23%) or government (16%) though 23 respondents (15%) were from industry. This gives an indication of where Fortran continues to have an impact. More on this below.
  4. There was a real mixture of roles, which we have (for now) aggregated into: academic (33%), Research Software Engineer or similar (25%), computational scientist (23%) and volunteer (9%). Some respondents did question the difference between academic and computational scientist. That may be a weakness in the design of the study.
  5. There was a fairly uniform spread of respondents’ age: 25yrs - 34yrs (20%), 35-44 (27%), 45-54 (20%), and then a tail off. This spread of ages is encouraging for the future of the Fortran community.
  6. In terms of gender: male (87%), female (8%), non-binary (1%). This distribution is unfortunate but also not unexpected.
  7. 80% of respondents had doctorates, which is at least partly explained by the fact that Fortran is mostly used in research-related contexts. The majority (82%) of respondents, irrespective of specific qualification, said that their qualification was essential or directly relevant to the work they did.
  8. Most respondents (79%) work on more than one Fortran codebase. One implication is that, in my view, we made the correct survey-design choice, i.e., to ask respondents to focus on a single codebase, and thus reduce the “it depends” responses. That said, that most respondents work on more than one codebase is an indication that there may be many codebase we have “missed” in the survey. Of course, it’s hard to know what effect that survey-design choice has had - something for us to explore in due course.
  9. Respondents chose the single codebase for many reasons, the most frequent being: the codebase I most frequently work on; the most important codebase for me; the most significant codebase to science and engineering. On this final point, see item 15 below.
  10. The majority of codebases chosen were applications (75%), with a sixth (16%) being libraries, and then tools and other types of codebase.
  11. 58 respondents (39%) provided URLs for git-based repositories, the majority being github. Some respondents provided URLs to their own domain, which may be git-based (it’s not obvious to tell from the URL). Others provided the name of the codebase. Others explained the codebase is private. URLs are of course helpful for us, e.g., to undertake further analyses of the codebases to better characterise codebases.
  12. A 1/4 of codebases are developed and maintained by one person, with 2/5ths (40%) developed and maintained by 2 - 5 people. In other words, almost 2/3rds of codebases are maintained by small teams. This of course raises risks about the future of these codebases.
  13. Codebases varied in size from ~1000 LOC to 5MLOC to some indication of more than that. 50% of codebases are considered to be large or very large.
  14. 76% of codebases are not considered to be legacy codebases by the respondents. A very similar proportion (~70%) occurs in relation to others, i.e., 70% of respondents thought that others do not consider the codebases legacy either. Recognising that there may be an dependence between these %s, the %s are interesting because of the perception that people outside of the Fortran community have about Fortran, i.e., that Fortran and Fortran codebases are legacy codebases.
  15. In terms of the scientific and engineering disciplines ‘dependent’ on the respective codebases, there’s more analysis we need to do but the following extracted keywords give an indication of the disciplines - the square brackets provide context: astronomy, fluid [dynamics’], CFD, flow, climate, ecosystem, weather, environment, earth, water, magnetics, chemical, chemistry, physic [stemmed to cover physical and physics], particle, quantum, X-ray, plasma, matter, material, mechanical, fusion, nuclear, aero [aerospace], automotive, engineering, genetic, electronic, hydraulics, crystallography, economic, health, data, PDE, signal [processing].
  16. Finally, the survey asked respondents how they’d like to be acknowledged. Where real names were given for acknowledgement, with no alternatives provided, we have retained those names (though removed email domain names). On a few occasions, we have ‘played safe’ at the moment and not named individuals. We acknowledge: an RSE from a Helmholtz research institute in Germany, “Keeping people and society safe”, AdAstraPerAspera, Amir Shahmoradi, Amy Roberts, Anon77, ariiJudeIS, BiathlonFan, Boteh, CabraLattice, CampanologicalToxophilite, CampFire, CJM, CLaSSGroupLead, cmaapic , CoolFortran, Dalekopera, dmio7839r, DogCatMouse, DrFortranFan, dwa, ForProfit, FortranIsStillMyFavorite, FortranKPDH, Fotranista123BEva, FragmentedEchidna, Gaits, Gideon, GOTO_EndOfSurvey, GoTo_remover, HerbertPeck, hjf, ibperth, IndAtHomeFort18, InTartifletteWeTrust, jasNW, lsm, Machalot, Martin Diehl, mathemagician, Milan Skocic, Modeller2026, mwatkins, NumberCrunching4QD, OldCrustyAstroGuy, otisthecat, paleoprogrammer, Partecipant 21, ParticipantJad, PDS, PH, Phoenix, platipodium, Polis, PRIMA, RSEwithAGPL, SelaBuri, Simulacrum, T3, TNT, upg88743, yarchik.

There is of course more - much more - analyses to follow, both in terms of questions that we’ve not looked at yet (e.g., licenses, Fortran revisions, challenges), but also in terms of sub-samples (e.g., how the results for applications compare with those for libraries, how results for Research Software Engineers compare with those of academics/scientists).

If you’ve any questions, please either ask them here on the discourse space, message me direct on discourse, or email me.

Thank you again to everyone who contributed to the survey.

Austen

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